October 18, 2011

You can see the drawing — "Bridge No. 114" — and read about the creation of Nat Tate by writer William Boyd here.

It all started in 1998. I was on the editorial board of Modern Painters magazine, then a very classy and influential art quarterly, and one day in a meeting the editor of the magazine, Karen Wright, wondered out loud if there was a way we could introduce some fiction into the mix of artists' profiles, exhibition reviews and general essays in which the magazine specialised. I don't know what made me speak out but I said, without really thinking: "Why don't I invent an artist?" And so Nat Tate was born.

So Boyd wrote his story, making Tate an Abstract Expressionist who gets depressed about his art after meeting Picasso* and ends up burning all his artwork and committing suicide.** Boyd allowed his fictional story to be published as a glossy art book with illustrations of artwork, and it was presented as if it were about a real artist. That it, it was a joke — the launch party was on an April Fool's Day 1998 — or, if you prefer, a hoax. People fell for it. The truth was revealed. Boyd professes himself hurt that it was called a hoax and not a joke. (Contemplate the hoax/joke distinction.)

Dogged by the accusations of hoax, Boyd conceived closure:

If this fictional artist could sell an artwork for real money then the Nat Tate story would have reached some kind of apotheosis and consummation. So I "found" another Nat Tate drawing – one from his famous bridge sequence... Sotheby's had form when it came to selling art by fictional artists, having successfully auctioned a Bruno Hat painting some years previously. Hat was a spoof artist that a group of bright young things had invented in 1929 and staged an exhibition of his work in a London town-house.... Hook consulted with colleagues and in due course I was told the sale was on...

Presumably, the form attends to all the incipient legal issues. If you go looking for closure, you surely don't want to touch off litigation. But the notion of closure is also fictional, no? I hadn't remembered the 12-year old story, and now I'm propagating it.

Actually, I like the idea of a fictional artist, and the artwork itself is real. (I've read "The Recognitions" by William Gaddis — "a masterwork about art and forgery, and the increasingly thin line between the counterfeit and the fake.") In the blogosphere, boring, humorless people express outrage when pranksters and artists experiment with "sockpuppets." It's too hard to play in this complex world we've made for ourselves. (Why did we go to all this trouble to exclude play?!)

But Boyd duly anticipates outrage. The proceeds from the sale of "Bridge No. 114" will go to a charity. Artist's Benevolent Institution. Wouldn't it be funny if that the name of William Boyd's bank account? No, you're not laughing? You're one of the killjoys!
_____________________________

*And Braque. Seriously, why kill yourself over Braque? What cherry on the top of a depression sundae is Braque? I'd have to read the book to tell you. There, I just bought the book. I'll tell you later. You, the 2 people who read this blog and want to know how Braque augmented Picasso in the emotional arc toward a fictional suicide.

** He uses the same suicide method — jumping off the Staten Island ferry — used by Spalding Gray. I hope Gray didn't read this book, looking, perhaps for inspiration.

ADDED: From Boyd's book:

... Nat felt vastly more at ease with Braque than with Picasso and gladly accepted when Braque offered to show him around his studio. Braque was then reworking his painting La Terrasse, which he had begun some eleven years earlier, a fact that Tate found astonishing, not to say incomprehensible. He was also deeply moved and captivated by some of the smaller elongated landscapes and seascapes in the studio. Apparently Tate ventured the opinion that they reminded him of van Gogh’s late landscapes. After gently correcting Tate’s pronunciation (‘Van Go? Non, mon ami, jamais’), Braque commented that he ‘regarded van Gogh as a great painter of night.’ The observation seemed to trouble Nat unduly, as if it was prophetic or gnomic in some sinister way... There is a photograph of the fête champêtre that Nat and Barkasian had with Braque and his family and friends during that visit, taken by Barkasian, one assumes, as he is absent from the picture. Braque himself sits at the centre of the table, dappled with autumn sunshine, while the women of the household fuss over the food and the placement. Nat stands close to the master, on his left, a plate in his hand, almost as if he is about to serve him. But his gaze is unfocused, he looks out of frame, at something in the middle distance, or perhaps just lost in his darkening thoughts. Nothing would ever be the same again.

So what was it about Braque that could drive you to suicide? His douchebag pronunciation of "Van Gogh"? His high school French? (I can talk French like that: Oui, mon ami, toujours!) Or was it the fact that — unlike an Abstract Expressionist — he fussed over a painting for 11 years, and — unlike an Abstract Expressionist — he maintained a calm and pretty domestic life? Dammit, that's it! I can't take it anymore!

"In the blogosphere, boring, humorless people express outrage when pranksters and artists experiment with "sockpuppets." It's too hard to play in this complex world we've made for ourselves. "

Well well... I would say Althouse definitely puts herself more in the 'pranksters and artists' camp than the 'boring and humorless people' camp. Does this mean she's experimented with sock puppets in the comments thread? If you were an Althouse sock puppet, what would you do?

1)Claim every expertise known to man. 2)Declare my vast knowledge with poorly written/misspelled bullet statements.3) Bench 450 pounds.4) Insult every single person that posts here for no apparent reason.5) Butcher the Spanish language.6) Use a one-letter screen name that comes after I.7) Host a blog no one reads.

I have never used a pseudonym here. (I've written on other websites, perhaps only Metafilter and AOL, using a nom de plume — Alizaria — that I created long ago, before I started blogging. I still comment occasionally on Metafilter, but if you click on "Alizaria" you get to a page that shows my real name.)

But in the early days of blogging, I had a lot of creative ideas about creating an alter ego, someone with a blog who would come over here and antagonize me. I thought it would be similar to Plato writing dialogues to get his ideas out. And I wanted to just play with the great new art form that is blogging. But then people displayed such a lack of playfulness about sockpuppets. I took my inspiration in different directions. It's pretty sad, really. Or it forces me to be the character, and, in that context, it's obvious that a lot of humorless folk don't get me.

1)Claim every expertise known to man. 2)Declare my vast knowledge with poorly written/misspelled bullet statements.//7) Host a blog no one readsHey Squat-tard you wiccansatanist I was gonna use that idea! You freak’n LDS “sock puppet” comer mis cortos, joto!

I feel I provide a valuable service…I give you “J” without having to actually bring “J” here, and it gives “J” more time on the couch with the Cheetoh’s…All-in-all, I think Althouse and “J” owe me some money for this service.

Blech. I doubled up on "creative." You can't edit comments. The shame is preserved forever, unless you redo, republish, and delete. But then it's out of order. Like life itself.

The shame! Like I'm parading creativity. And it's about something I never did. Just imagine -- if you are at all creative -- all the wonderful things I would have written, if only... I hadn't wimped out when faced with idea that I would inspire outrage in people I obviously don't respect.

Far be it from me to judge end of life issues, I am not there yet, but as with other famous suicides, such as Hemmingway, Gray had suffered an accident that left him with brain damage. He wasn't in the best of mental health before the injury, so perhaps he didn't need inspiration, as you put it.

But why does it matter? You hope he didn't read it, "looking, perhaps for inspiration"? Why?

And was this a case of self murder or suicide?

As for Nat Tate (Eastwing Hirschhorn?), that's some funny stuff. He really did suck, and I am glad he killed himself.

I always suspected “Sir Archie” or “Titus” were Althouse sock puppets…I miss Sir Archie, I got here just as he was leaving…always well-thought out and well-executed, informative, but not snarky, humane and yet on-point…

The novel by Charles Willeford called The Burnt Orange Heresy about a critic who invents a painter (the painter exists but he has never painted anything much) and gets an article about him into a giant art encyclopedia (more column inches than Durer), and then kills the one person who knows about it, his girlfriend as you say explores similar territory, but is also a gripping fun read with lots of fascinating asides about how the art game works. I think I'm the only critic who in turn has written extensively about that book -- it's in my book Comedy after Postmodernism: Rereading comedy from Edward Lear to Charles Willeford (Texas Tech UP 2001). Some of the noir guys like Janwillem van der Wetering and the novelist's widow read the essay but didn't understand it (too much postmodernism in it). Still, what a great novel, and thanks for mentioning it!

Braque is one of my favorite painters. I don't like everything he did but I like a lot of it. I particularly like the way he could abstract something enough to simplify it, capture the essence and beauty of the scene but you can still recognize the scene without turning your head sideways.

According to Amazon, Richard Castle's "first novel, In a Hail of Bullets, published while he was still in college, received the Nom DePlume Society's prestigious Tom Straw Award for Mystery Literature."

I started to read A Frolic of His Own, but gave up in bewilderment. I think I'll start it again. I should also read Recognitions. A Frolic of His Own begins with a guy on his deathbed, or at least in hospital, having a conversation for about thirty pages with his wife over whether they should sue someone but there is no he said she said he just expects you to follow it. It's possible to do it, but it's an extreme challenge and I have to admit that the tangentialness of it was really screwy -- then it segues into a Richard Serra sculpture down at th eFederal Building in NYC, and controversies about getting a cat out of it, and it's just really hard to follow an dwhen you can it didn't strike me as being worth it, but maybe in the aggregate it's worth it?

I'm never quite sure how to interpret the "not to say" circumlocution. Sometimes, it seems to mean "I used this word specifically, and don't mean this other, related word that's farther down some pejorative spectrum.

And sometimes it seems to mean that the more pejorative word really applies.

I always suspected “Sir Archie” or “Titus” were Althouse sock puppets…I miss Sir Archie, I got here just as he was leaving…

From appearances, Sir Archy discreetly outed himself a few months ago. There may have been subsequent comments and revelations on the topic, but if so I missed them. And I don't know if there's been any closure.

"I always suspected “Sir Archie” or “Titus” were Althouse sock puppets…I miss Sir Archie, I got here just as he was leaving…always well-thought out and well-executed, informative, but not snarky, humane and yet on-point…"

If Sir Archy had been me — and I would never have chosen that kind of verbosity — I would have made the final flouncing off way more interesting and hilarious.

As for Titus... yeah, I'd be proud of myself if I did that. As proud as Titus is of his latest "loaf."

I edited to exclude your incorrect interpretation of my writing. I assumed everyone knows Braque was a cubist. I used the phrase "unlike you typical Abstract Expressionist" to allow for the fact that some Abstract Expressionists did take a lot of time to finish a painting and did have a happy home life. But the stereotype is the opposite.

I've simplified it to "unlike an Abstract Expressionist," which bluntly relies on the stereotype.

My apologies to the nice hardworking Abstract Expressionists out there, living and dead.

Spalding Gray went to a private prep school in Maine (Fryeburg Academy, $40,000 per year) and then a private college (Emerson, $25,000 per year), so Mom and Pop spent around $260,000 for Spalding's B.A. in poetry. His Dad was a white-collar numbers-cruncher for a machine tools company. Rain on a red wheelbarrow and petals on a black bough. American story.

Fewer than 1% of students enrolled in school in the United States attend an independent private preparatory school, a small fraction compared with the 9% who attend parochial schools and 88% who attend public schools.

Spalding belonged to the elite of the elite. His brothers' names: Rockwell, Jr. and Channing. Man. Names like Matt and Bob just won't do for that family.

Skeet shooting with Rockwell and Channing? Yes. With Matt and Bob? No way.

I've always assumed that Meade was actually an Althouse sock puppet. How else do you explain why I was not invited to the wedding? In fact, I'll go so far as to say that nobody here has ever met this so-called Meade.

And of course, if any of you claim to have met him, I'll have to assume that you are simply another Althouse sock puppet.

In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if all of you are Althouse sock puppets, and that I'm the only real commenter here. If so, she's going to an awful lot of trouble to keep me entertained. I wonder what she's up to?

"n fact, I'm beginning to wonder if all of you are Althouse sock puppets, and that I'm the only real commenter here. If so, she's going to an awful lot of trouble to keep me entertained. I wonder what she's up to?"

The real question is whether I am the real Althouse. What do you really know about the real person who grew up in Delaware and has been teaching law since 1984 in a remote outpost in the Midwest.

Hey Jeffrey, rain on a red wheelbarrow was written by a real doctor doctor, not a Phid, who made real house calls to real sick people his whole working life. But then he was a real poet not a poetaster ala Spalding.

This past Sunday 60 MINUTES featured a segment with the authors of a new biography of Van Gogh, who offer their theory that he did not kill himself, but was shot, accidentally or purposely, by two teenage boys who had borrowed a pistol from Van Gogh's landlord.

Yep, there were two references in my comment: William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. For Williams, he was mostly after images without metaphorical extension. Just rain on a red wheelbarrow, he wrote. Something all of us can fix in our imagination.

Spalding's Dad worked for Brown & Sharpe, a company that made precision tools and one that would later have a lot of labor issues. I have nothing against Spalding Gray, but he grew up in a world very different from mine (I grew up in a small town in Iowa, a farming community). Very few people in my town made $40,000 a year when I was growing up. The idea of spending that much for one year of high school would have been considered bizarre.

Maybe Spalding never fit in because of his weird name. A boy named Sue fought back, but with Spalding I think you just cave in. The government should norm kids' names. Obama could set up a new czar. Names' czar. He'd lose a huge part of his constituency, but it's something that needs to be regulated. All boys could be called Barack. All girls could be called Michelle.

I thought I read that there was a woman artist, once, who chose a male nom de plume and got quite a lot of praise until she was found out, at which point the stuffy-artsy sorts suddenly discovered she wasn't as talented as they thought. I don't remember who that was supposed to have been, though.

People get mad when the point of the deception was to make fools of them. After all, that was the point.

http://www.travistea.com/

Take Travis Tea. The whole point was to expose the predatory vanity publisher, Publish America. I'm quite certain they had (and have) no sense of humor about it at all. Everyone else thinks it's hilarious. You can, in fact, purchase the novel, Atlanta Nights, and last I heard someone was trying to make a documentary about it all.

I took one of Richard Castle's books out of the library and was sorely disappointed that it does not contain a copyright notice so I couldn't see who wrote it. But people can incorporate their pseudonym and put the copyright in that name anyway. But the thing of it is... every one knows that this is a bit of recursive performance art. It's fun because we're in on it.

I don't think my nom de internet bothers anyone because I'm not trying to pull a fast one on anyone.

I think it only appears complicated. When people are in on the joke, if it is having a conversation with themselves or being a pretend artist, they enjoy the joke. When it's a pen-name, movie star's pseudonymn, or even nom de guerre, it's not a case of concealing who you are because you're promoting that appellation and it is yourself. When the goal is to make someone angry, they get angry, and if your alter-ego is used as a proof of what your primary-ego is trying to prove, then it's perceived as fraud.